Surge Engine

Make your dreams come true! Open Surge Engine is an open-source 2D retro game engine for making your dreams come true.

It's a ton of fun! Surge the Rabbit is a featured jump 'n' run created with the Open Surge Engine. It's made in the spirit of classic 16-bit retro platformers of the 1990s. Play as Surge in fun and exciting levels filled with challenges!

Unleash your creativity! Create your own amazing indie games and play them on your PC and on your mobile device! Share the games that you create with your friends and have them play using the engine. It's limitless fun!

A powerful engine for retro games! One of the core elements of the engine is SurgeScript, a scripting language for games. Use it to create new gameplay mechanics, characters with special abilities, bosses, and much more! The sky is the limit!

Open Surge Engine is a valuable tool for learning game development, programming, artistic skills, and the nature of free and open-source software in a playful way.

Support the project

Please support the development of the project:

Documentation

• Open Surge Wiki
• Introduction to modding
• SurgeScript documentation

About

The project is written from the ground up in C language, using the Allegro game programming library. It has been started by Alexandre Martins, a computer scientist from Brazil. Nowadays, it has contributors all over the world!

Contribute

See CONTRIBUTING.

Advanced users

Command-line options

Run opensurge --help

Running MODs

Extract the MOD to your filesystem and run the game.

• Windows: launch the executable.
• Linux, macOS: run opensurge --game /path/to/game/ on the command-line or load the game from the options screen.

Linux users should extract MODs preferably to their home folder. Flatpak users may use ~/Downloads.

Visit the wiki for more information on user-made MODs.

Paths

Content is distributed in the following locations: (since version 0.6.1)

• bin: executable file
• share: game assets (images, audio, levels, scripts, etc.)
• user: user-modifiable data (preferences, logs, screenshots, additional assets such as user-made levels)

The default paths of these locations vary according to the platform:

• Windows (.zip package):

  • bin: ./opensurge.exe
  • share: .
  • user: . or %OPENSURGE_USER_PATH%

• Linux:

  • bin: /usr/games/opensurge
  • share: /usr/share/games/opensurge/
  • user: ~/.local/share/opensurge/ or $XDG_DATA_HOME/opensurge/ or $OPENSURGE_USER_PATH

• Linux (Flatpak):

  • bin: flatpak run org.opensurge2d.OpenSurge
  • share: /var/lib/flatpak/app/org.opensurge2d.OpenSurge/current/active/files/share/opensurge/
  • user: ~/.var/app/org.opensurge2d.OpenSurge/data/opensurge/ or $OPENSURGE_USER_PATH

  If you use $OPENSURGE_USER_PATH, make sure it points to a subdirectory of ~/Downloads ($XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR).

• Linux (Snap):

  • bin: snap run opensurge
  • share: /snap/opensurge/current/share/games/opensurge/
  • user: ~/snap/opensurge/current/.local/share/opensurge/ or $OPENSURGE_USER_PATH

  If you use $OPENSURGE_USER_PATH, make sure it points to a subdirectory of your home folder.

• macOS:

  • bin: Contents/MacOS
  • share: Contents/Resources
  • user: ~/Library/Application Support/opensurge/ or $OPENSURGE_USER_PATH

If you intend to hack the game, it's easier to have all files in the same place (read-write), because some of the above folders are read-only. Download the sources (use the same engine version), extract them to your filesystem and use the --game-folder command-line option.

Tip: since version 0.6.1, check the Engine information at the options screen to see where the files are. Alternatively, you can use the command-line option --verbose: the directories will appear at the beginning of the output.

Compiling the engine

Dependencies:

• Allegro version 5.2.7 or later (modified 5.2.9 on Android)
• SurgeScript version 0.6.0
• PhysicsFS version 3.2.0 (recommended) or 3.0.2

Compile as usual:

cd /path/to/opensurge/
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install

Use cmake-gui or ccmake for tweaking, like installing the engine to or finding the dependencies on non-standard paths.

License

Open Surge Engine Copyright 2008-present Alexandre Martins. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. For more information, see LICENSE.